6of15The La Calenda margarita on the bar at La Calenda restaurant in Yountville.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

7of15Exterior views of La Calenda restaurant in Yountville, Calif., on Wednesday February 27, 2019.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

8of15The churros with dulce de leche at La Calenda restaurant in Yountville,Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

9of15Chef de cuisine Kaelin Ulrich Trilling stands for a portrait at La Calenda restaurant in Yountville.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

10of15The bar area leading into the kitchen at La Calenda.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

11of15The tacos de pescado, made with fried fish, chipotle mayo, cilantro, cabbage and lime at La Calenda.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

12of15Mismatched decorative wooden chairs and booth seating in the dinning room at La Calenda restaurant in Yountville, Calif., on Wednesday February 27, 2019.Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

13of15The Tamal de Calabaza, above, charred butternut squash tamal in avocado leaf and spicy black bean salsa, at La Calenda in Yountville.Photo: Photos by Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

14of15Bottles of Tequila and sugar skulls in the wine room at La Calenda restaurant in Yountville.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

15of15The tres leches cake at La Calenda.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

Though this may shock some of you, I really like La Calenda, the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group’s new Mexican restaurant in Yountville. I think it is certainly an example of culinary appropriation. And I think that’s fine.

I first heard about La Calenda via Twitter: When the news broke that the renowned chef’s restaurant group had bought the former Hurley’s space and was turning it into a taqueria, I read more than a few skeptical takes on the project. Was this going to be another example of a white chef Columbusing food from non-white cultures and claiming to “elevate” it? Were people just being overly sensitive? Apart from being periodically seen ordering food from the taco truck parked outside of a local dive bar, Keller doesn’t have much of a reputation as a Mexican food enthusiast.

And once The Chronicle announced that I would be their new restaurant critic, I received several requests from Chronicle readers and others to review the place, like I was some kind of cultural appropriation attack dog they could sic on white chefs who’ve gone bamboo.

This whole deal is related to a question that I get all the time, in hastily written emails and during Q&A sessions: “What’s the difference between culinary appropriation and appreciation?” So I thought, why not check out La Calenda and see if I have anything left to say on the topic?

Sure, when I first walked into La Calenda, I couldn’t help but wear a skeptical grimace as I glanced around. I saw little wooden mariachi players, sculptures and mismatched shabby-chic furniture. Four huge flat-screen TVs, all showing different sports games, gave me pause. So did the walls, which were painted Casa Bonita pink. But ultimately, I found the experience of eating at La Calenda to be a very pleasant one — fun, even. More importantly, I detected small touches in the food and ambience that showed that the people in charge are doing their damnedest to do the right thing.

Regarding The Question of the difference between appropriation and appreciation, here’s what I always say: Cultural appropriation, in itself, is not an inherently bad thing. In a vacuum — in a world where no one has conquered, massacred or enslaved anyone else — the practice of one person adopting the cultural practices of another is a benign act that seems like a natural thing that would result from any kind of meaningful mixing or interaction.

But we don’t live in a vacuum, and sometimes appropriation can be one way for global systems of oppression, like white supremacy or settler colonialism, to perpetuate themselves. It can be a way for an oppressor to control the food or dress or language of people they want to keep underfoot, by profiting from or mocking those things. As a measure of oppression, cultural appropriation is most useful when it indicates that wealth and intellectual property have been stolen from the people who produced it in the first place.

That is why this question frustrates me. Often it comes from a very surface-level place of people asking for permission to do things, generally in the hope that they won’t get roasted on Twitter or Instagram. But the real thing people with power should be asking is, how do I actively dismantle systems of oppression or, at a bare minimum, redistribute my own privilege to benefit those who have historically had less of it?

Chef de cuisine Kaelin Ulrich Trilling slices al pastor meat from a spit in the kitchen at La Calenda restaurant in Yountville.

Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

To that end, it’s apparent that the folks at La Calenda are proud of their connections to Mexico, whether it’s through the chef de cuisine Kaelin Ulrich Trilling’s narrative of growing up with his culinary expert mother and tomato farmer father in Oaxaca, or through the super un-local move of importing Mexican corn for house-made tortillas.

What’s really telling to me are the things you’ll find on your table: Guamúchil wooden platters, mezcal copitas and clay pitchers made by artisans in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. On the website, the names of those artisans, not Thomas Keller’s, are among the first words you read as you scroll down from the taco header image. It reminds me of Samin Nosrat’s admirable efforts to make sure viewers of her Netflix show, “Salt Fat Acid Heat,” could buy products from the featured purveyors through her website. With that simple touch, the people who labored over those goods are granted as much credit as Heath Ceramics and Riedel for their contributions to the restaurant world. That’s not something that always happens, and it matters.

The music you’ll hear at La Calenda feels fresh and relevant, too. When I dined there, the soundtrack included tracks that I’d heard while dining out in contemporary, youthful restaurants in places like Sayulita and Mexico City, from classic rock groups like Maná to folks you’d hear on NPR’s Alt.Latino.

Though a lot of the press surrounding the opening made much of an allegedly strong Oaxacan angle, the menu has clearly gone broader. As the official summary featured on the website and in job postings puts it, La Calenda features dishes from Oaxaca “while casting a glance across a range of Mexican regional cuisines.”

You won’t find Oaxacan specialities like tlayudas or chapulines here, though some of the great regional moles do make appearances. All of the menu items are listed in Spanish, with even the Bay Area’s notorious beet and goat cheese salad adapted to ensalada de betabeles ($12). (I definitely chuckled when I saw that. And did not order it.)

The puerco en mole verde, made with pork jowl in mole verde with white beans, at La Calenda restaurant in Yountville.

Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

The standouts of the menu demonstrated an intimate knowledge of Mexican culinary conventions and bent them in intriguing ways. With the puerco en mole verde ($22), pork jowl cooked sous vide and seared on a wood-fired grill, this kitchen turns a tough cut of meat into something that, if you closed your eyes while chewing, could pass for a luxurious piece of fatty salmon. You can and probably will spread that pork onto a tortilla as if it were a slice of ripe avocado. With white beans in a bright green mole and lovely miniature Swiss chard leaves on top as a garnish, this dish was fully realized and beautiful to look at. In comparison, the pollo en mole negro ($22) was well-executed and moist throughout, but less easy on the eyes: halved and covered in mole, the chicken immediately reminded me of Anakin Skywalker using his one arm to crawl out of a lava pit in “Revenge of the Sith.”

Another dish of note was the tacos de hongos ($11), an assortment of local mushrooms cooked like any old guisado with poblanos, roasted pepper salsa and epazote. The kitchen changes up the components with availability, and on the night I had them they consisted of a mix of hen-of-the-woods mushroom and enoki: Appearance-wise the filling was a dead ringer for pulled chicken, with a satisfying amount of squeakiness from the mushrooms. The epazote gave it a wonderful savoriness and a compelling toasty undertone. According to our server, it was probably the least-ordered item on the menu. I hope they keep it: It’s smart.

I was also very surprised to find worm salt — literally, salt mixed with ground-up agave worms and chile pepper — on the rim of the otherwise nondescript La Calenda Margarita ($14). The menu doesn’t list it as a component of the drink, but its smokiness was unmistakable. When I asked our server, he confirmed. The bartender deserves a tip of the hat for that move.

There was one thing that came off badly on each visit: the totopos y salsas ($7.50 or $13 with guacamole) were strangely awful each time I tried them. They were crunchy on the outside but quickly morphed into a gummy paste in my mouth. My companions and I kept powering through and eating them because we couldn’t get enough of the accompanying salsas — a piquant one made chiefly with tomatillos and a well-balanced, dark red alternative. How do you screw up tortilla chips at a place where nixtamalizing your own corn for masa is the norm? When I asked our server if the chips were made in-house, he surprised me by saying they get the tortillas from a purveyor and then fry them there. It’s such a weird hiccup, especially when so many Mexican restaurants manage to make better versions from a process that essentially comes down to proper food-waste management. I don’t know what they were trying to do with this. I hope they stop doing that, because most everything else is so finely tuned.

With Trilling’s direction and expertise, the menu pushes Mexican cuisine in the Bay Area forward in genuinely interesting and clever ways. I can’t say how the Keller restaurant group and its PR wing received the criticism of their initial announcement because they have generally been reticent to talk to press about this project, but to their credit, it seems their response was mostly to stand back and let Trilling and the restaurant speak for themselves. The young chef is an expert in his own right and deserves respect for that. This kind of soft allyship is a good starting point, and I hope that they do everything they can to empower Trilling to be a leader in the field going forward.

Plant-based options: Substantial and varied, with at least one good option in most menu categories. You’ll leave satisfied. Remember that they put worm salt on the margarita, though.

Drinks: Full bar with lots of agave-based liquors.

Transportation: 10-minute walk from the Vine’s 29 line.

Best practices: No reservations taken, so show up early or midweek. If it’s busy, you can more quickly score a seat at the bar. It seems like their new lunch service is less hectic.

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The final verdict: When Thomas Keller, a white American chef, puts his name on a Mexican restaurant project, it is indeed an example of cultural appropriation. That’s a fact. But here are questions that one has to ask in order to go deeper into the spirit of what appropriation actually means: Who is benefiting materially from this project? Keller and his very rich partners, of course. But does some of that profit go toward investing in the talents of people who’ve truly got skin in the game? Are the right people receiving credit for what we’ve experienced in this restaurant? From what I’ve seen so far, I believe the answer is yes.

Soleil Ho’s tenure as The Chronicle's Restaurant Critic began in 2019. She was previously a freelance food and pop culture writer, a podcast maker, and restaurant chef. Her seminal work, the Racist Sandwich podcast, covered the myriad ways in which food intersects with race, class, and gender.